Installation of Oracle 10gR2 on CentOS 4.7 for personal study

I bought a new laptop with Windows XP professional SP3 - I requested to downgrade to Windows XP from Vista when I placed the order. However I found that Windows XP can only recognize 3GB memory though BIOS shows 4GB installed. I have to live with that for now since I don't want to use Vista. I assigned myself a project to install Oracle 10gR2 software on CentOS 4.7 and use virtual machine technology.

The steps I took to accomplish this project will be described as follows:

1. Download VMware Server 2.0 from http://www.vmware.com/download/server/

2. Download CentOS 4.7 from http://www.centos.org

3. Create a virtual machine through VMware Infrastructure Web Access.
The vitural machine was created successfully with inital RAM 768M and host-only for the network configuration. After creating the virtual machine, I login with VMware Console. I obtained the IP address of the vitual machine by ifconfig, which is 192.168.233.128. I did not specify anything during installation, so this IP is kind of automatically configured. I verified that I can ping and ssh using this IP from host machine.

4. Configure Cygwin/X
Since I knew I need X-windows to lanch Oracle Universal Installer and I decided not to run it within the server (virtual machine), instead from the host machine, I configured the Cygwin/X. The User guide about how to install and config Cygwin/X is here. I verified I can ssh to the virtual machine and launch xclient such as XCLOK. The command involved:

In the Cygwin terminal:
$ sh /usr/bin/startxwin.sh

Cygwin X terminal shown up, then:
$ ssh -Y -l oracle 192.168.233.128

I found that I did not need set DISPLAY environment variable at all.

5. Download Oracle 10gR2 and sftp to the virtual machine

6. Install Oracle 10gR2

I followed this article ( http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/smiley_10gdb_install.html) to install the software. When I checked the required packages, I found that two package are missing:
- sysstat
- libaio is not installed

I decide to ignore it, but the first installation failed, Oracle complains that libaio is not found and also indicated the minimum memory requirement is not met. So I downloaded these two packages from http://mirror.astate.edu/pub/centos/4.7/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS After installing them and increased the memory size of the virtual machine to 1G, the Oracle software got installed successfully.


Note: 'usermod' can be used to modify user group, ex.

[root@localhost /]# groupadd oinstall
[root@localhost /]# usermod -g oinstall -G dba oracle
[root@localhost /]# id oracle
uid=500(oracle) gid=502(oinstall) groups=502(oinstall),501(dba)